Rate My Professor Robert Rumely

Robert Rumely is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Georgia, where he served from 1981 until his retirement in 2017. He earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1978, advised by Goro Shimura, with the dissertation titled 'An Explicit Formula for the Grossencharacter of an Abelian Variety with Complex Multiplication.' Prior to his appointment at UGA, he held temporary positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1974. Rumely's research interests encompass capacity theory, arithmetic geometry, arithmetic dynamics, arithmetic aspects of mathematical logic, algebraic number theory, algorithms, and computational mathematics. He is a co-inventor of the Adleman-Pomerance-Rumely primality test, introduced in the 1983 Annals of Mathematics paper 'On Distinguishing Prime Numbers from Composites' co-authored with Leonard Adleman and Carl Pomerance.

Rumely has authored or co-authored four significant monographs: Capacity Theory on Algebraic Curves (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 1378, Springer-Verlag, 1989), Existence of the Sectional Capacity (with C. F. Lau and R. Varley, Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society 145, 2000), Potential Theory and Dynamics on the Berkovich Projective Line (with Matthew Baker, Mathematical Surveys and Monographs 159, American Mathematical Society, 2010), and Capacity Theory with Local Rationality: The Strong Fekete-Szego Theorem on Curves (Mathematical Surveys and Monographs 193, American Mathematical Society, 2013). Other key publications include 'Undecidability and Definability for the Theory of Global Fields' (Transactions of the AMS, 1981) and contributions to arithmetic capacity theory such as 'Capacity Theory and Arithmetic Intersection Theory' (Duke Mathematical Journal, 2003). He supervised eight Ph.D. students at UGA from 2003 to 2016. Rumely received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1983 and was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 for contributions to arithmetic potential theory, computational number theory, and arithmetic dynamics. A conference titled 'Potential Theory and Arithmetic Dynamics' was held in his honor at UGA in 2017.